Technical Field
The present invention relates to an in-vehicle camera device.
Related Art
There is known a technique with which a camera device is mounted to the inner side of a vehicle windshield to recognize a person, a vehicle, or the like present in an area ahead of the vehicle on the basis of an image captured by the camera device. This type of a camera device tends to have a high temperature under strong sunlight, for example, and the temperature can exceed an operating temperature limit of the camera device. As a measure against this, a patent literature JP-A-2003-300414 proposes a camera device having a housing whose surface is provided with an infrared reflective member. With this configuration, infrared rays included in the sunlight are reflected off the infrared reflective member to minimize temperature rise of the camera device.
In the camera device described in the above patent literature JP-A-2003-300414, temperature rise of the camera device is minimized by reflecting the infrared rays. With this measure, however, the camera device itself is not cooled. Therefore, if the temperature rises in the camera device for some reason, prompt lowering of the temperature is difficult. On the other hand, when the temperature of the environment external to the vehicle is low (e.g. in winter), the camera device of this type causes fogging in a portion of the windshield in front of the camera device, creating problems in capturing an image.